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Three years (and ten days) ago, I arrived back in Dallas after a yearlong road trip spent exploring the face of college ministry across the U.S. The firstfruits of that trip was my book, Reaching the Campus Tribes: An Opening Inquiry. The response to that FREE ebook was incredibly encouraging.
Since we’re at the start of yet another school year, I wanted to remind you that the book is out there – and point you to some uses for it that you may want to consider:
- Use with student leaders. Pick out some sections (or just have ‘em read the whole thing) to help them see themselves as the “missionaries to their own campus” that they’re meant to be.
- Send to overseers / supporters. Reaching the Campus Tribes is meant to point outsiders to the glories of college ministry, too. Whether you send them the link or just pull some quotes, I’d be excited if it helps you share what you’re doing with the people who help you do it!
- Pass it on to other college ministers. I think they’d appreciate it (and I would, too!).
- (Re)read it. Remind yourself of the awesomeness of what you’re doing… and why doing it like missions is the best way to go. If you’ve read it before, I bet you’ll pick up something new this time!
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What are you already putting in place within your college ministry to successfully assess its impact later on this semester?
Evaluation may take place after-the-fact, but preparing for evaluation before-the-fact might make the after-the-fact happen better. To do this, we may just have to get to thinking: What will I be looking for? How am I going to get that info? Can I evaluate along-the-way (mid-semester, mid-week, mid-event, mid-retreat) and adjust? Who will help me evaluate? Whose assessment – while not unimportant – might not matter as much?
(The first step of good evaluation, of course, is figuring out what purposes you’re aiming for in the first place.)
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Last week, the local college ministry I volunteer in held its first large group meeting. As the college minister was on the stage introducing the ministry to the new (and old) students, I realized that much of what he said is probably quite similar to what he said last year at this time. And the year before that. And the year before that.
And that’s a good thing.
We are wise to keep in mind that novelty in our college ministries – a new way of doing things, a new vision to cast, a new teaching series – is ONLY valuable if it serves our purposes better than older ways. Novelty in itself is rarely a good enough reason to try something in college ministry.
Why? Because our students are in a really formative, “hinge” stage in their lives. They will often need much of the same, great-in-the-basics impact as the classes before them did. Further, our students turn over so quickly – and even year to year, students forget what you said a year ago. There’s not often a need to be novel.
But the temptation for us, especially when we’ve been serving in one campus ministry for awhile, is to “change things up” simply because – if we’re honest – we’re the ones who find the old ways passé. Even things God has used to impact students profoundly, year after year.
For example, I’ve known of college ministers who now (seem to) avoid taking students to Passion Conferences simply because they’ve gone so many times. To the college minister, it’s begun to feel somehow “dated.” (Never mind that this batch of students hasn’t ever attended.)
On the flipside, one good example of avoiding novelty for the sake of impact is the (semi-)trend of college ministries developing multi-year “lesson plans”: recognizing what they want students to know when they leave, and teaching the same things (updated, of course) every few years.
Novelty can be a great thing, but when it’s pursued for its own sake within college ministry, it can be the enemy of good impact.
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Today’s my spiritual birthday. It’s always a neat day to remember what Christ has done in my life (both before and after I acknowledged it!). I realize theologies differ on exactly when conversion happens, but as best I can figure, it was on August 25th many years ago that I entered a personal relationship with God through Jesus.
In light of my own lil’ holiday AND as you face a new school year, I wanted to repost one of six ways I suggested we could energize evangelism in our campus ministries:
Commemorate spiritual birthdays (the first one and later ones). If we believe that there really was a moment in every Christian’s life when he or she went from death to life, then that’s a big deal! So yes, celebrate when people come to Christ, but it’s also quite fitting to celebrate the date people came to Christ – last year or last decade! (See the other five suggestions here.)
I later expanded on this idea (including 12 ways to accomplish this celebration!):
In my family, my parents would treat my spiritual birthday (like my sister’s) like another holiday in our year. So every August 25th, I’d get a card and a congrats. Later on, I have often taken that day as a special day to seek the Lord, review His work in my life over the past year, and celebrate His salvation.
I s’pose our attention on “spiritual birthdays” as a family made me think about celebrating them within my first college ministry experience. So as I made the info forms for our Upstream Freshman Bible Study group, I (1) put a “Spiritual Birthday” line on those forms. (I either did it then or later, in my second Freshman Bible study. Either way…)
Not only did that provide a helpful gauge for whether or not people claimed to be Christians, but it gave us something to celebrate within the year! This is a very easy way to get this info; you could, of course, (2) simply ask individuals you’re discipling. Or perhaps you could (3) encourage your students to put it on their Facebook pages - that could actually be a phenomenal witness, couldn’t it?
Then what do we do with the info? Honestly, whatever you do for physical birthdays could probably be done for spiritual birthdays, too: Perhaps (4) an announcement, (5) birthday treats or a cake, (6) listing it in the weekly email, (7) sending a Facebook message, (8) putting it in the “program,” (9) giving a little present in Large Group.
You might consider (10) something special for the first anniversary of people’s conversions, too. That highlights students coming to Christ at this age, and I bet it’s pretty encouraging for those newer believers.
And for everybody, you might indeed (11) encourage them to make that day a personal spiritual holiday. Take it from me, that can be pretty awesome.
Lastly, it’s important to (12) realize that not all Christian students will know their spiritual birthdays. So we gotta work that in somehow. You can find some thoughts on doing that here.
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A friend of mine and I were talking the other day about how we’ve become better critical thinkers – in our years since college – and about how we apply that to some of the spiritual conversations or messages we hear.
It’s a scary truth: Christian college students probably do a lot of “lapping up” of what you (and other Christian leaders) teach. It’s not completely their fault: They don’t have the “wisdom of years,” and many have come out of homes, churches, and youth groups that didn’t push critical evaluation as a priority. (How many teachers encourage their audience to “take me with a grain of salt”?)
But my encouragement today, as we start a new year, isn’t about training our students in discernment (though of course that would be great). My encouragement today is to make sure our own teaching isn’t going to fool or confuse students who – naturally – aren’t as skilled in discernment as they will be in 20 years. We’ve got to make sure our teaching is thoughtful, wise, and true… and it’s incredibly easy for our words to be hasty, unthoughtful, and zealous-without-the-requisite-wisdom.
In other words, be extremely careful and thoughtful about what you teach – even in your examples, your illustrations, and your “asides.”
It’s tempting to utter platitudes… when principles are all that’s called for.
It’s easy to treat extremely wise guidelines… as outright rules.
It’s common to hear Bible verses used a little bit wrongly, stereotypes given a little too much credence, and the personal experience (or personal soapboxes) of the leader given a little too much weight.
Want to help your students walk forward in wisdom? Prayerfully scrub as many “near truths” and (untrue) platitudes from your teaching as you can this year. (And while you’re at it, teach them discernment, too.)
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I know you’re likely either in the first week of school or preparing for the first week of school…
…but I need to remind you about the Catalyst Conference this October, and our College Ministers Cohort!
For more info (now or later), go to the Facebook Event and RSVP as MAYBE or YES. You’ll get updates as I have them, and eventually I’ll send info on how you can sign up officially (yes, you’ll need a ticket).
Meanwhile, through Thursday we’ve got a $199 rate going (cheaper than even the normal Group Rates!). If you need our Group Code, be sure to RSVP (as Maybe or Yes), and I’ll send it out between now and Thursday (or just contact me directly).
I hope you’ll consider Catalyst and the College Ministers Cohort – it’s going to be a blast!
Are you teaching your students about relationships like…
…a large number of them will be single for another decade?
If we’re stuck in a past when college ministry mostly shepherded students who were likely to be married within a few years, we’re doing it wrong! (Right?)
While it depends on the city and the region and even (or perhaps mostly!) the campus, the truth is that raising up students who are great at being single is our job, and will deeply impact many of our collegians – both now and for years to come.
Ten years ago, many of us expected to be married immediately or soon after college. But that didn’t happen for lots of us late Gen Xers and now Millennials – and now Singles (or better, Young Adult) Ministries are populated by many people who are simply still “Single for a Season,” not only those “Single for a Reason.”
So if you’re only teaching on Dating or Preparing for Marriage, you’d better hope your students have excellent filing systems for your notes. What many of them will need far more (and far more often) between now and Age 28 is instruction on being awesome Singles.
I got to thinking about this because Christianity Today posted some thoughts from the recently deceased John Stott, a lifelong bachelor. At the end of the article are several links to discussions of singleness from CT. I hope you’ll take a look.
We must never exalt singleness (as some early church fathers did, notably Tertullian) as if it were a higher and holier vocation than marriage. We must reject the ascetic tradition which disparages sex as legalized lust, and marriage as legalized fornication. No, no. Sex is the good gift of a good Creator, and marriage is his own institution.
If marriage is good, singleness is also good. It’s an example of the balance of Scripture that, although Genesis 2:18 indicates that it is good to marry, 1 Corinthians 7:1 (in answer to a question posed by the Corinthians) says that “it is good for a man not to marry.” So both the married and the single states are “good”; neither is in itself better or worse than the other. [Read the full 2-page article and find those other links here.]
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All week, I’ve blogged some thoughts about why College Ministers are really important – and I’ve aimed for reasons we don’t usually hear about / think about. Hope they’ve been encouraging. (Those four posts are here, here, here, and here.)
Now that it’s Friday, I want to encourage you to consider a Fridea along the same lines: Spend some hours (between now and the school year’s start) to actively remember why this work is SO vital.
Maybe you can start with my posts from this week…
…but I bet you have memories you can use: What was the first experience that made you think, “I want to be a campus minister”? How did God call you to this task? What were some of the early Best Moments, the moments when you saw exciting fruit and were glad to be exactly where you are?
What were some of the victories of the past year?
You also have resources you can use to remind yourself that THIS WORK MATTERS. If you work for a campus ministry organization, there are probably some sort of “Why College Ministry?” pamphlets or other propaganda lying around… When’s the last time you read them to convince yourself?
But what’s more, you might even need to take your (own) word for it! Look at the emails you’ve sent out to supporters. If you’re in a church, think through the arguments you’ve made (or would make) to your overseers and to parents about why this stuff is vital. How have you explained the glories of college ministry to your family and friends? Listen to yourself!
You KNOW college ministry matters. But right here, right before you jump in again with gusto, it might help to REMEMBER WHY college ministry matters.
Enjoy the hours.
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All week, I’ve been posting some less-familiar (but quite BIG) reasons your work in college ministry matters SO MUCH. I hope it’s a helpful boost as the new year approaches! (The first three are here, here, and here.)
Obviously, most of us are very tuned in to the need to recruit freshmen in the coming weeks! But how often do you reflect on just how high those stakes are?
I try never to caricature the “college experience” as some sort of evil, dark place (like many Christian leaders and parents seem to). But we campus ministers do know that there is much darkness in many of these campus tribes, and there are a zillion opportunities for students to scar themselves – for life.
As a college minister, you offer a choice,
a hinge moment,
an opportunity to take hold of life
when death is easy to find during the college years.
By recruiting, we’re fighting;
by advertising, we’re calling;
by introducing students to our ministries, we’re offering beauty
even as chaos and darkness looms.
If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to read on. This essay was first written during my yearlong road trip, at the 137th campus I explored, Jacksonville University. It also serves as the conclusion to my ebook, Reaching the Campus Tribes. For this week of celebrating our work, it’s a great read (or re-read) about the stand we’re taking, simply by serving as college ministers.
Orientation (A Vision Trip)
In the last week, I’ve had the opportunity to visit two campuses – West Virginia University and George Mason University – which happened to be holding New Student Orientation activities during my visits.
For the uninitiated, NSO is a summer event when freshmen make their way to campus, often with parents in tow, in order to (presumably) get “oriented” for the year to come. This event often involves registering for classes, touring the campus, learning traditions and other school “rules,” and perhaps even moving in to the dorms.
Orientation also brings recruitment by countless organizations. Depending on the school, this can include extracurricular activities (frats, clubs, ministries, etc.), but it very likely also includes community establishments…
…such as banks, with their slick cups and pens and checkbook holders, recruiting students and their (parents’) money. You’ll also find newspaper subscription-hawkers, cell phone companies, and the ever-present bookstore, who will remind you from the beginning of your college experience that its convenience and support of the school make higher prices worth the cost.
Each business recognizes that this is a fresh crop, a group of pre-freshmen ready to be served! After all, a whole bunch of customers just graduated in May, and while their faces are long forgotten, their patronage is certainly missed.
(The credit card companies are probably absent at this point; they will instead show up within the semester, when parents aren’t around, with lots of free T-shirts or other flashy giveaways.)
This is Orientation.
But as missionaries, we look closer.
This is a land of fresh, wide-eyed potential. 18-year-old men and women walk these halls with maps they won’t soon need. Over the next four years, they will encounter a sort of life they haven’t known, with freedoms to do and be and become. The skin of high school, often so restrictive with its cliques and malformed “cool” and Babel-like, single-language culture, will be shed. New friends, new acceptance, new opportunities are here, whether this place is 50,000 people strong or much smaller.
A college is bigger than its numbers.
The hustle and bustle that will soon be found daily on campus will be a great visual metaphor for the life, the energy, the haphazard but steady progress that happens in this place.
Successes in the next four years will lead to the greatest joys imaginable, with experiences that last a lifetime or even lead these beautiful people to a new sort of life altogether. Reinventing oneself is not an uncommon event on a college campus.
These men and women will “find themselves” in all the best ways: within majors they didn’t know existed, within communities they didn’t know could exist, within new routines and challenging schedules and the maturity that makes life breathe easier. Leaders will rise up, either realizing the potential we always knew they had… or shocking everyone with ability we never knew existed.
Some of these men and women will find husbands and wives over the next four years, and many others will have their “antes upped,” as co-ed friendships help raise the bar on what they’re looking for in a significant other.
In even the first month of school, many of these guys and gals will join clubs that will “stick.” Many will start a friendship that will last forever. Many will be invited to a Bible study. Many will find their church – or at least start looking with intentionality. Many will reflect on this new experience after a few weeks, grin, and look forward to an amazing four years.
In those next four years, plenty of these men and women will get a leadership position. Or two. They’ll get in shape. Get a kiss (even their first, in some cases). Get engaged. Learn to schedule. Get a 4.0. Get honored. Make 2,000 Facebook friends. Find a career. Study abroad. Let go a little, loosen up a bit, mature a lot, and laugh nearly every day.
Some of these nearly-collegians will be back smiling next year at Orientation, happily representing the glories they’ve found to a new batch ready to be influenced and trained. Many of those glories would pleasantly surprise them today.
And some of those booths will be ministry booths, because the college ministry communities will have welcomed in Christians and non-Christians for discipleship and fellowship and conversion and love. Lots and lots of love. Boys and girls will come to school uncommitted and will leave vibrant, wide-eyed Jesus followers, and the whole world will be different because of it.
As missionaries, we look.
This Orientation also presents a land of unspeakable danger. 18-year-olds walking these halls at Orientation don’t realize the changes about to take place, and there are few good maps. Over the next four years, they will encounter a sort of life they haven’t known, with freedoms to fail and waste and destroy. The buffers of high school and family, often places of unappreciated coziness and naiveté and ever-present help, will be long gone. New kinds of pain, new temptation, new harshness are here, whether this place is 50,000 people strong or much smaller.
A college is bigger than its numbers.
The hustle and bustle that will soon be found daily on campus will conceal much of the death, the hurt, the haphazard and steady decay haunting this place.
Simple “mess-ups” in the next four years will lead to the deepest pain imaginable, in some cases pains that last a lifetime or even lead these beautiful people to take their lives altogether. Collegiate suicide is not an uncommon event.
These boys and girls will “find themselves” in all the worst ways: within temptations they didn’t know existed, within relationships they didn’t think could exist, within new routines and schedules and the stresses that can color days gray. Cults will rise up: cults of personality, cults of pleasure, and even real religious cults.
Many will “play house” over the next four years, and even today at Orientation the girls flaunt bodies, and even today the boys muster courage and methods to take them up on it. Many boys and girls will lower their expectations, willing to do much and accept many that they wouldn’t have only a year or two before, in hopes of touch and friendship and love and promise.
In even the first month of school, many will be invited to parties that get them in over their heads. Many will get drunk for the first time. Many won’t be invited to a Bible study. Many will attend church for the last time for many years. Many will reflect on this new experience after a few weeks, shudder, and walk forward into four long years.
In those next four years, plenty of these men and women will make a life-changing bad decision. Or three. They’ll get in heavy debt. Have a homosexual encounter (even their first, in some cases). Get an eating disorder. Get depressed. Reject their faith. Abort their education. Abort a child. Bring shame to themselves, their family, or their student organization. Masterfully learn “the world,” in all its selfishness and evil and temporary gratification. Lose friends. Let go of too much, loosen up too much, mature too little, and cry on many, many days.
Some of these nearly-collegians will be back smiling next year at Orientation, happily representing the “glories” they’ve found to a new batch ready to be influenced and trained. Many of those glories would repel them today.
This is the brink called Orientation, as men and women walk the halls of campus with their soon-tossed maps and their soon-absent parents and their fearful hope in tow.
(You can download Reaching the Campus Tribes for free.)
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This week, I’ve been posting some of the less-familiar reasons College Ministry is such an amazing field – I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a little encouragement as school starts up!
While I’ve written about it here on the blog and in my book, you won’t hear too many people (yet) notice the obvious truth:
College ministers are operating “R&D” for the rest of the American Church.
We interact with lives (and whole generations) when they’re first “released into the wild”;
we do ministry in the context of the cutting edge of culture and education;
we encounter the adversaries and opportunities the rest of Christianity will face 5 years from now.
We are raising up the Church’s future leaders,
developing future forms of ministry,
in environments that foreshadow the future of the nation.
Can you believe we get to serve here?
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